That's fast. I just love the details behind the facts: Pentiums suck, I'll take 1 G4 over a P4 at ANY speed. Anyway, enough trolling, if you click on the processors link [apple.com] in the article, apple gives a pretty nice overview of why their dual processor G4's are really, really nice.
You actually admit to buying into Apple.com rants?;)
Pentium 3s and Pentium 4s can both perform four 32-bit floating point operations in a single cycle via SSE/SSE2, like the G4 does theirs with Altivec. What's more, the Pentium 4 can ALSO do 2 64-bit floating point operations per cycle, while the G4 can't. Pentium 4s can do double-precision SIMD, Altivec cannot, to put pt bluntly. The '8' figure for 32-bit fp calculations comes from having dual processors. Maybe Intel should start advertising the Pentium 3s as doing up to 128 fp ops per second, because you can get ones that work in groups of 32 CPUs?
It really bugs me how Apple makes blanket statements like that, comparing Altivec on the G4 to non-SSE/SSE2 Pentium systems, then claiming it's an advantage. It's blatantly false advertising, why hasn't anyone busted them?
The G4 isn't fast at all compared to the modern PC processors, honestly. The G5 may indeed turn the table...but the G4 can't keep ramping up like the P4/Athlon have.
My favorite part on their site is the Quake 3 Benchmarks. A Dual 1GHz G4 system with a GeForce 4 MX gets 115fps in 1024x768. Compare that to PC performance: A 2.0GHz P4 (one CPU, and this isn't even a Northwood) gets 127.3 fps with a GeForce 2 Pro, and 233.7 fps with a GeForce 3 Ti500.
That's pretty pathetic, given how much you're paying for it. I guess most Mac users aren't gamers anyway, but it's still fascinating when the Mac users brag their systems are faster these days.;)
If MS is really reorganising itself around.Net, then contributing to a clone is roughly equivalent to contribuing to Wine.
Except when they're charging for the service provided by.NET, not the actual.NET framework per se.
If there's OpenSource clients for.NET, that's just more potential customers for MS. Who cares if the client programs may be written by someone else, the service still links back to MS.
This is the desktop that people think we should emulate? No thanks.
So now we're also blaming Microsoft for InstallShield (and its clones) doing the full-screen blue-background installer?
Microsoft's installer (MSI) is actually very cool, doesn't run at full screen, and allows for some customizability.
You can also change exactly where the files are installed, it just usually defaults to C:\Program Files\Company\Product. Is that just so difficult that it warranted a post about?
It's amazing what gets modded up on Slashdot these days, sensationalist trolls become insightful...
AMD will play to a MUCH broader market than intel can envision, YES I WANT ONE ON MY DESKTOP, And Intel dosent see that market exists YET, then again Intel has never pushed bit copmputing capability, it has almost always lagged at LEAST 2 generations (16 bit when 32 and 64 were availabe) Some of this is vendor support, some of it lack of commitment to it, look at the clock speeds on the Itanium's and tell me, do they really expect this 64 bit pig to fly ? Huh?
There is absolutely no market for desktop 64-bit CPUs today. There is a market for workstation 64-bit CPUs, true, but that's hardly that large.
You're acting like a jump from 32 to 64-bit boosts gaming performance, while that's not necessarily the case.
The only time desktop users will need > 4GB of RAM will be in a couple years, and by then a mature IA64 will be available for the desktop. If all goes as planned.
What may happen is Intel may use this "Yamhill" in the meantime to get a cut out of the desktop CPU process, and once the IA64 is mature and ready for the mainstream, will start pushing people over to it. It'll be considerably nicer than x86 once the compilers catch up, and probably run that 64-bit code quite a bit faster since it's native instead of a kludge.
That article always left a funny taste in my mouth.
Why was he comparing next-gen DDR (DDR333), which isn't officially out yet, to the OLD PC800 RDRAM? Wouldn't it make more sense to compare PC1066 RDRAM (see the AcesHardware benchmarks)?
PC1066 RDRAM and DDR333 will both come out officially around the same time in official chipset support.
In other words, next-gen DDR performance for the P4 is about 1.5 years behind the RDRAM performance. Tom didn't mention that part...
In other news, Samsung is sampling PC1200 RDRAM now, too. 4.8GB/s in a dual channel config.
The US and the states are acting in the public interest, not in Netscape's. That would make sense, but Netscape, Sun, et. al lobbied very, very heavily for the lawsuit, and that's why it exists. The DoJ wouldn't have done anything without the lobby.
AOL/TW sits back and waits to see what happens, letting the US and the states spend all the money. What you conveniently left out was the huge hordes of money spent lobbying to the DoJ to get the case started.
The problem with Netscape (AOL) is just that it's a hypocrite. They whine about how bundling IE ruined their business, when they don't use IE themselves. Every time you install ICQ/Winamp/etc they slam 'Join AOL!' icons all over you desktop. They sit on AIM refusing any competition in the Instant Messanger market...
Of course the vast majority don't change the default. Conversely, the vast majority of people really don't care about this feature (honestly!). In general, the only people who care deeply about this issue are the people who would be clueful enough to disable it.
someone actually came out and called that "Modified Pentium 3" what it really is...
It's closer to a Pentium III than a Celeron. Celerons have 4-way L2 cache, Pentium IIIs have 8-way L2 cache. There's about a 10% performance difference between those two. The reason why it's often mistaken for a Celeron is people just look at the L2 cache number (128KB rather than 256KB), and not the L2 cache speed.
I'm sick of MS apologists. Microsoft makes shit. It's shit that's getting better, but it's still shit. Don't whine and say it's unfair. They have the money, the power, and the resources to make what is far and away the best software in the world. And yet we get articles like this, and we get people like you whining about how MS is being treated unfairly. Forget it.
My friends, the parent post is the reason why most people don't look upon Linux as a realistic alternative. It's supported, in general, by a bunch of pimply-faced teenagers full of angst and with statements filled with cuss-words and a hate for the status quo.
You really want to change how MS software works? Go work for them. Or go make software to compete with them. Trolling on Slashdot does nothing but destroys any possible attempt at Linux getting a serious outlook from the PHBs.
Re:As an Xbox developer... *bogus*
on
X-Box Emulated (Not)
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· Score: 2, Informative
GForce hards do T&L and a whole host of shaders in HARDWARE already. It's already been pointed out the GForce within the XBox is a weaker version of the bottom line GForce3. A Ti200 and Ti500 will eat it alive in performance.
Can I have a toke, too?
GeForce 3s have one vertex pipeline for T&L and vertex shaders, the Xbox GPU has two vertex pipelines. Theoretically, that's twice the T&L power of a GeForce 3 already.
You wanna see a sweet dual processor system? Check out the World's First Prestonia benchmarks. 2 CPUs (1.8GHz) with 512KB of full-speed L2 cache, and functioning SMT. The BIOS reports it as 4 CPUs.
Exercise your own power and refuse to publish in inferior, non free formats. Creating the financial incentive for hardware makers to respect your interests is just as easy as that. People who buy these new players are going to get burnt when WMA changes two years from now. The makers of those devices are going to get a big black eye from it. Don't you think that part of the tech slowdown comes from user uncertianty created by nothing M$ working right? It hurts to screw up. Meanwhile, my png, ogg mpegs and what not will work the same.
Why do you think the people who are buying these players are going to get burnt?
They don't lose anything by having the additional WMA support, at all. And as WMA versions progress, the decoder doesn't change. It's like changing MP3 encoders, is all. No one will get burned. Why aren't you saying the same thing about MP3-playback on DVD players, that has the same opportunity to "burn the consumers"...
Microsoft are spending $500Million at marketing the X-Box? Sony are still out-selling them today with the 18month old PS2 selling at the same pricepoint as X-box, and the Gamecube is outselling it worldwide too im sure since Nintendo successfully carried out a launch in both Asia and the USA when Microsoft obviously hasn't heard of other continents yet. The PS2 will always be #1 this round, it's got such a head start and massive game library it'd be impossible to say otherwise.
However, you say the Gamecube is selling it worldwide: Is that really fair? Xbox isn't available outside North America. Where the Xbox and Gamecube and PS2 compete, the most up to date numbers are:
PS2: 6.6 Million
Xbox: 1.3 Million
Gamecube: 1.2 Million
Yes, it's somewhat "neat," but unless you're some bored grandparent (who spends all day taking pictures of her grandkids) or spinster (who spends all day taking pictures of her cat... er, cats), how often will you use this feature?
You forget that the target market for these machines are the people who enjoy the tie-died iMacs. Of course they're going to be taking pictures of their cats, mice, hamsters, children, or other smell pets. They're the type of people who will get those photos printed off for $30/album, and sends them to you thinking you care.
The guy's article is a comical rant about Windows and how it doesn't actually get more stable with time. Yet apparently he's actually not even used XP, which contrary to what some people say, is a great deal more stable than Win9x is. NT's kernel is far and above superior to the others, and personally I've had uptimes for weeks before rebooting for the obligatory auto-update security patches.
If Slashdot ever wants to be taken seriously, you gotta stop posting these articles which have no factual base, are just one man's experiences, and someone who doesn't actually use the latest (and sadly, greatest) version of the product he's ranting about.
Yes, of course we need faster processors. Not only does it bring down the cost of the mainstream processors, but you always need more power. Always!
The big deal here isn't the 2GHz anyway. 2GHz has already been done, the big deal is the new core. The Northwood core is the first Pentium 4 chip to use copper interconnects instead of aluminum, it's much smaller (read: cheaper to make), it runs cooler (2.0GHz ran at 31C maximum temperature, overclocked to 2.5GHz it was 41C max temp). And it can clock much higher.
It's the new core that matters, not the speed (although Northwood is debuting at 2.2Ghz...)
Aside from the meager "5-10%" performance boost per clock that GamePC reports, the new PC1066 RDRAM and 533MHz FSB coming in a few months offers a "12%" performance boost per clock, when used with the original P4.
Northwood + 533MHz FSB/PC1066 RDRAM should be quite nifty.
According to that chart there, PC1066 RDRAM actually has lower latency than PC133 SDRAM. I don't know how accurate that is, but it says PC1066 RDRAM takes 207 cycles for 128 bytes, and PC133 takes 229 cycles (PC800 took 270)?
Maybe I'm reading that wrong or don't know some specifics about RDRAM architecture, but that sounds nifty...
Forgot to cite articles:
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1566&p=9
From the article: The drive itself is a CAV drive meaning that it can read data per second off of the outer tracks of the disc than on the inner. The Xbox DVD drive is also a CAV drive capable of reading at anywhere between 2.5MB/s and 6.25MB/s. The GameCube drive is slower and can read between 2MB/s at the inner tracks and 3.125MB/s at the outer tracks.
That's a major reason N64 remained a cartridge, I think - they, too, couldn't tolerate the load times. And that's why Gamecube uses ultra-small proprietary format DVDs, I believe - there are virtually no loadtimes whatsoever! And where there are load times, they are cleverly hidden under cinematic prelude (which should have been done in the first place on CD consoles *and* PCs).
Actually, that's not exactly true. Transfer rates on the 1.5GB Gamecube disks are less than those on the Xbox's. The disk just doesn't move as fast as the outsider tracks on the 5X DVD. Xbox takes a rather unusual design in how the DVDs are pressed, in that they data is stored from the outside track in. The outside track of the DVDs has 5x reading speed, the very insider track has 1-2x. Vast majority of games (today) are on the outside tracks, which is actually quite a bit faster than the 1.5GB mini-DVDs on the Gamecube. The mini-DVDs spin a little faster, but they outside tracks move a lot slower, due to the smaller size.
The "1.5GB mini-DVDs means smaller loading times!" is a crock. Nintendo has the 1.5GB Mini-DVDs to curb piracy.
Then comes Microsoft thinking they can take the industry... I guess the jury is still out, but every seller of the XBox I've ever talked to will unofficially tell me, they hate the XBox and wouldn't recommend it to anyone in spite of the fact that it's got awesome graphics and stuff. You must live in some sort of cave, then. Most of the ones sure tried to sell me the $300 box over the $200 box.:)
When I play games, I don't want BSOD. Especially not during network play that Microsoft intends to make loads of money from. That level of unreliability will be completely intollerable to gamers everywhere who are used to simple reliability of Sony and Nintendo. That's great! Because Xbox doesn't have BSODs, or GSODs. 99%+ of people don't have issues with it. No crashings, no defects, nadda. 'Hundreds' out of the estimated 1.5 Million Xboxes sold had defects. Don't you think this is being overplayed a tad?
Playstation 2s had defects, Playstation had defects. No electronics have 100% success rates, this is about normal. Hell, my Sony WEGA 36XBR400 (expensive HDTV) didn't work at all. Called the Sony techs, they came and dinked around. Weeks later, a truck came, pulled it away. Weeks after, a new one came, and it worked.
To think this problem is unique to MS is just silly. What is unique to MS is this giant magnifying glass being put over the entire console by people who WANT the Xbox to fail. By people who already hate Microsoft and believe every product they put out is buggy and unstable. Then when the slightest inkling of this actually happens, everyone posts the stories to Slashdot and shrieks "I told you so!". It's almost funny, but it's too sad to be funny.
This is really, really old news...and a hoax
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Xbox Sequel Rumors
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· Score: 5, Informative
Slashdot Mirror
That's fast. I just love the details behind the facts: Pentiums suck, I'll take 1 G4 over a P4 at ANY speed. Anyway, enough trolling, if you click on the processors link [apple.com] in the article, apple gives a pretty nice overview of why their dual processor G4's are really, really nice.
;)
;)
You actually admit to buying into Apple.com rants?
Pentium 3s and Pentium 4s can both perform four 32-bit floating point operations in a single cycle via SSE/SSE2, like the G4 does theirs with Altivec. What's more, the Pentium 4 can ALSO do 2 64-bit floating point operations per cycle, while the G4 can't. Pentium 4s can do double-precision SIMD, Altivec cannot, to put pt bluntly. The '8' figure for 32-bit fp calculations comes from having dual processors. Maybe Intel should start advertising the Pentium 3s as doing up to 128 fp ops per second, because you can get ones that work in groups of 32 CPUs?
It really bugs me how Apple makes blanket statements like that, comparing Altivec on the G4 to non-SSE/SSE2 Pentium systems, then claiming it's an advantage. It's blatantly false advertising, why hasn't anyone busted them?
The G4 isn't fast at all compared to the modern PC processors, honestly. The G5 may indeed turn the table...but the G4 can't keep ramping up like the P4/Athlon have.
My favorite part on their site is the Quake 3 Benchmarks. A Dual 1GHz G4 system with a GeForce 4 MX gets 115fps in 1024x768. Compare that to PC performance: A 2.0GHz P4 (one CPU, and this isn't even a Northwood) gets 127.3 fps with a GeForce 2 Pro, and 233.7 fps with a GeForce 3 Ti500.
That's pretty pathetic, given how much you're paying for it. I guess most Mac users aren't gamers anyway, but it's still fascinating when the Mac users brag their systems are faster these days.
If MS is really reorganising itself around .Net, then contributing to a clone is roughly equivalent to contribuing to Wine.
.NET, not the actual .NET framework per se.
.NET, that's just more potential customers for MS. Who cares if the client programs may be written by someone else, the service still links back to MS.
Except when they're charging for the service provided by
If there's OpenSource clients for
This is the desktop that people think we should emulate? No thanks.
So now we're also blaming Microsoft for InstallShield (and its clones) doing the full-screen blue-background installer?
Microsoft's installer (MSI) is actually very cool, doesn't run at full screen, and allows for some customizability.
You can also change exactly where the files are installed, it just usually defaults to C:\Program Files\Company\Product. Is that just so difficult that it warranted a post about?
It's amazing what gets modded up on Slashdot these days, sensationalist trolls become insightful...
AMD will play to a MUCH broader market than intel can envision, YES I WANT ONE ON MY DESKTOP, And Intel dosent see that market exists YET, then again Intel has never pushed bit copmputing capability, it has almost always lagged at LEAST 2 generations (16 bit when 32 and 64 were availabe) Some of this is vendor support, some of it lack of commitment to it, look at the clock speeds on the Itanium's and tell me, do they really expect this 64 bit pig to fly ?
Huh?
There is absolutely no market for desktop 64-bit CPUs today. There is a market for workstation 64-bit CPUs, true, but that's hardly that large.
You're acting like a jump from 32 to 64-bit boosts gaming performance, while that's not necessarily the case.
The only time desktop users will need > 4GB of RAM will be in a couple years, and by then a mature IA64 will be available for the desktop. If all goes as planned.
What may happen is Intel may use this "Yamhill" in the meantime to get a cut out of the desktop CPU process, and once the IA64 is mature and ready for the mainstream, will start pushing people over to it. It'll be considerably nicer than x86 once the compilers catch up, and probably run that 64-bit code quite a bit faster since it's native instead of a kludge.
That article always left a funny taste in my mouth.
Why was he comparing next-gen DDR (DDR333), which isn't officially out yet, to the OLD PC800 RDRAM? Wouldn't it make more sense to compare PC1066 RDRAM (see the AcesHardware benchmarks)?
PC1066 RDRAM and DDR333 will both come out officially around the same time in official chipset support.
In other words, next-gen DDR performance for the P4 is about 1.5 years behind the RDRAM performance. Tom didn't mention that part...
In other news, Samsung is sampling PC1200 RDRAM now, too. 4.8GB/s in a dual channel config.
News for nerds: Signage in a post office. Yeah...
Stuff that matters: MS advertising in post offices. Indeed, the world will never be the same.
The US and the states are acting in the public interest, not in Netscape's.
That would make sense, but Netscape, Sun, et. al lobbied very, very heavily for the lawsuit, and that's why it exists. The DoJ wouldn't have done anything without the lobby.
AOL/TW sits back and waits to see what happens, letting the US and the states spend all the money.
What you conveniently left out was the huge hordes of money spent lobbying to the DoJ to get the case started.
The problem with Netscape (AOL) is just that it's a hypocrite. They whine about how bundling IE ruined their business, when they don't use IE themselves. Every time you install ICQ/Winamp/etc they slam 'Join AOL!' icons all over you desktop. They sit on AIM refusing any competition in the Instant Messanger market...
Of course the vast majority don't change the default. Conversely, the vast majority of people really don't care about this feature (honestly!). In general, the only people who care deeply about this issue are the people who would be clueful enough to disable it.
someone actually came out and called that "Modified Pentium 3" what it really is...
It's closer to a Pentium III than a Celeron. Celerons have 4-way L2 cache, Pentium IIIs have 8-way L2 cache. There's about a 10% performance difference between those two. The reason why it's often mistaken for a Celeron is people just look at the L2 cache number (128KB rather than 256KB), and not the L2 cache speed.
I'm sick of MS apologists. Microsoft makes shit. It's shit that's getting better, but it's still shit. Don't whine and say it's unfair. They have the money, the power, and the resources to make what is far and away the best software in the world. And yet we get articles like this, and we get people like you whining about how MS is being treated unfairly. Forget it.
My friends, the parent post is the reason why most people don't look upon Linux as a realistic alternative. It's supported, in general, by a bunch of pimply-faced teenagers full of angst and with statements filled with cuss-words and a hate for the status quo.
You really want to change how MS software works? Go work for them. Or go make software to compete with them. Trolling on Slashdot does nothing but destroys any possible attempt at Linux getting a serious outlook from the PHBs.
GForce hards do T&L and a whole host of shaders in HARDWARE already. It's already been pointed out the GForce within the XBox is a weaker version of the bottom line GForce3. A Ti200 and Ti500 will eat it alive in performance.
Can I have a toke, too?
GeForce 3s have one vertex pipeline for T&L and vertex shaders, the Xbox GPU has two vertex pipelines. Theoretically, that's twice the T&L power of a GeForce 3 already.
I did submit, they rejected it.
It's far more interesting to read about Durons and Celerons than the first mainstream implementation of SMT, I guess.
You wanna see a sweet dual processor system? Check out the World's First Prestonia benchmarks. 2 CPUs (1.8GHz) with 512KB of full-speed L2 cache, and functioning SMT. The BIOS reports it as 4 CPUs.
:)
The benchmarks speak for themselves. Zoom zoom.
Exercise your own power and refuse to publish in inferior, non free formats. Creating the financial incentive for hardware makers to respect your interests is just as easy as that. People who buy these new players are going to get burnt when WMA changes two years from now. The makers of those devices are going to get a big black eye from it. Don't you think that part of the tech slowdown comes from user uncertianty created by nothing M$ working right? It hurts to screw up. Meanwhile, my png, ogg mpegs and what not will work the same.
Why do you think the people who are buying these players are going to get burnt?
They don't lose anything by having the additional WMA support, at all. And as WMA versions progress, the decoder doesn't change. It's like changing MP3 encoders, is all. No one will get burned. Why aren't you saying the same thing about MP3-playback on DVD players, that has the same opportunity to "burn the consumers"...
Two years ago Creative added a free firmware update on NomadWorld.com that allowed WMA playback. Now it comes standard (has for a while).
Microsoft are spending $500Million at marketing the X-Box? Sony are still out-selling them today with the 18month old PS2 selling at the same pricepoint as X-box, and the Gamecube is outselling it worldwide too im sure since Nintendo successfully carried out a launch in both Asia and the USA when Microsoft obviously hasn't heard of other continents yet.
The PS2 will always be #1 this round, it's got such a head start and massive game library it'd be impossible to say otherwise.
However, you say the Gamecube is selling it worldwide: Is that really fair? Xbox isn't available outside North America. Where the Xbox and Gamecube and PS2 compete, the most up to date numbers are:
PS2: 6.6 Million
Xbox: 1.3 Million
Gamecube: 1.2 Million
Yes, it's somewhat "neat," but unless you're some bored grandparent (who spends all day taking pictures of her grandkids) or spinster (who spends all day taking pictures of her cat... er, cats), how often will you use this feature?
You forget that the target market for these machines are the people who enjoy the tie-died iMacs. Of course they're going to be taking pictures of their cats, mice, hamsters, children, or other smell pets. They're the type of people who will get those photos printed off for $30/album, and sends them to you thinking you care.
The guy's article is a comical rant about Windows and how it doesn't actually get more stable with time. Yet apparently he's actually not even used XP, which contrary to what some people say, is a great deal more stable than Win9x is. NT's kernel is far and above superior to the others, and personally I've had uptimes for weeks before rebooting for the obligatory auto-update security patches.
If Slashdot ever wants to be taken seriously, you gotta stop posting these articles which have no factual base, are just one man's experiences, and someone who doesn't actually use the latest (and sadly, greatest) version of the product he's ranting about.
Yes, of course we need faster processors. Not only does it bring down the cost of the mainstream processors, but you always need more power. Always!
The big deal here isn't the 2GHz anyway. 2GHz has already been done, the big deal is the new core. The Northwood core is the first Pentium 4 chip to use copper interconnects instead of aluminum, it's much smaller (read: cheaper to make), it runs cooler (2.0GHz ran at 31C maximum temperature, overclocked to 2.5GHz it was 41C max temp). And it can clock much higher.
It's the new core that matters, not the speed (although Northwood is debuting at 2.2Ghz...)
That's not true, they use RDRAM or SDRAM or DDR SDRAM. In fact there's a brand new artice that benchmarks them all.
Take your pick of RAM (although RDRAM and DDR are the only real choices).
Aside from the meager "5-10%" performance boost per clock that GamePC reports, the new PC1066 RDRAM and 533MHz FSB coming in a few months offers a "12%" performance boost per clock, when used with the original P4.
Northwood + 533MHz FSB/PC1066 RDRAM should be quite nifty.
The PC1066 benchmarks are here.
According to that chart there, PC1066 RDRAM actually has lower latency than PC133 SDRAM. I don't know how accurate that is, but it says PC1066 RDRAM takes 207 cycles for 128 bytes, and PC133 takes 229 cycles (PC800 took 270)?
Maybe I'm reading that wrong or don't know some specifics about RDRAM architecture, but that sounds nifty...
Forgot to cite articles:9
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1566&p=
From the article: The drive itself is a CAV drive meaning that it can read data per second off of the outer tracks of the disc than on the inner. The Xbox DVD drive is also a CAV drive capable of reading at anywhere between 2.5MB/s and 6.25MB/s. The GameCube drive is slower and can read between 2MB/s at the inner tracks and 3.125MB/s at the outer tracks.
That's a major reason N64 remained a cartridge, I think - they, too, couldn't tolerate the load times. And that's why Gamecube uses ultra-small proprietary format DVDs, I believe - there are virtually no loadtimes whatsoever! And where there are load times, they are cleverly hidden under cinematic prelude (which should have been done in the first place on CD consoles *and* PCs).
Actually, that's not exactly true. Transfer rates on the 1.5GB Gamecube disks are less than those on the Xbox's. The disk just doesn't move as fast as the outsider tracks on the 5X DVD. Xbox takes a rather unusual design in how the DVDs are pressed, in that they data is stored from the outside track in. The outside track of the DVDs has 5x reading speed, the very insider track has 1-2x. Vast majority of games (today) are on the outside tracks, which is actually quite a bit faster than the 1.5GB mini-DVDs on the Gamecube. The mini-DVDs spin a little faster, but they outside tracks move a lot slower, due to the smaller size.
The "1.5GB mini-DVDs means smaller loading times!" is a crock. Nintendo has the 1.5GB Mini-DVDs to curb piracy.
Then comes Microsoft thinking they can take the industry... I guess the jury is still out, but every seller of the XBox I've ever talked to will unofficially tell me, they hate the XBox and wouldn't recommend it to anyone in spite of the fact that it's got awesome graphics and stuff. :)
You must live in some sort of cave, then. Most of the ones sure tried to sell me the $300 box over the $200 box.
When I play games, I don't want BSOD. Especially not during network play that Microsoft intends to make loads of money from. That level of unreliability will be completely intollerable to gamers everywhere who are used to simple reliability of Sony and Nintendo.
That's great! Because Xbox doesn't have BSODs, or GSODs. 99%+ of people don't have issues with it. No crashings, no defects, nadda. 'Hundreds' out of the estimated 1.5 Million Xboxes sold had defects. Don't you think this is being overplayed a tad?
Playstation 2s had defects, Playstation had defects. No electronics have 100% success rates, this is about normal. Hell, my Sony WEGA 36XBR400 (expensive HDTV) didn't work at all. Called the Sony techs, they came and dinked around. Weeks later, a truck came, pulled it away. Weeks after, a new one came, and it worked.
To think this problem is unique to MS is just silly. What is unique to MS is this giant magnifying glass being put over the entire console by people who WANT the Xbox to fail. By people who already hate Microsoft and believe every product they put out is buggy and unstable. Then when the slightest inkling of this actually happens, everyone posts the stories to Slashdot and shrieks "I told you so!". It's almost funny, but it's too sad to be funny.
This came up months ago, everybody had a laugh. In fact, Slashdot posted about it.
It's a hoax, though. But probably not too far off from what MS will eventually do anyway.